The manufacturing industry's desire for efficient and economical welder training has been a well-documented topic over the past decade as the realization of a severe shortage of skilled welders is becoming alarmingly evident in today's factories, shipyards, and construction sites. A rapidly retiring workforce, combined with the slow pace of traditional instructor-based welder training has been the impetus for the development of more effective training technologies. To date, the majority of welding processes are performed manually, yet the field is lacking practical commercially available tools to track the performance of these manual (and semi-automatic) processes. Innovations which allow for the accelerated training of the manual dexterity skills specific to welding, along with the expeditious indoctrination of welding fundamentals are becoming a necessity. The tracking and characterization system disclosed herein addresses this vital need for improved welder training and enables the monitoring of manual and other welding processes, both actual and simulated, to ensure the processes are within permissible limits necessary to meet industry-wide quality requirements. Thus, there is an ongoing need for an effective system for training welders to properly execute various types of welds under various conditions and for general tracking to know position information. In particular to tracking technology used in these applications, there is a need for a system that can track multiple elements using receivers at each element at the same time without dedicated transmission systems for each receiver.